A Child's Right to Choose

Everything you need to know about this election from a four-year-old

About a week ago, my girls and I were unloading groceries from our minivan around 5 pm. I was trying to hustle and get dinner started, so I was unprepared when a group of people walked up onto our driveway.

They were a canvassing group, “Latinos for Blue” or something like that. With my children running around beside me, the gentleman in the group handed me a flyer. He told me they were out in support of Kamala Harris for president, Ruben Gallego for senate, and as he flipped to the back of the flyer, he lowered his voice, “and, of course, a woman’s right to choose.”

I almost retorted with, “Oh, you mean a woman’s right to kill her child?” (and I wish I had), but I stayed quiet. I was caught off guard with my kids right next to me and groceries in my hand and was not prepared for a political debate. He handed me the flyer and walked away.

My nine-year-old looked up at me as she leaned against our van with a slightly horrified look on her face. “Mom, do those people support Kamala!?” she asked in disbelief.

Clearly, we don’t shy away from talking about politics with our kids.

“Yes,” I replied. “Isn’t that awful?”

And then, with some spontaneity, I decided to return to the “woman’s right to choose” topic, since she had overheard the conversation.

I am the kind of mom who discusses things as they arise. When my children are wondering about rainbow displays during Pride month or what it means to get divorced or why a boy dresses like a girl, I don’t avoid the conversation. I use it as a natural moment to teach my children about God’s design and his commands, and I explain that people often disobey God.

I have already explained abortion to my eldest daughter who is now eleven, but with scarce detail. She knows that sometimes moms and doctors agree to kill a baby when it’s really tiny and take it out of the uterus. I haven’t discussed with her what an abortion looks like at 20 weeks or shared the horrors of the thousands of late-term abortions that happen in the U.S. each year. Children’s minds shouldn’t know such terror. (Neither should their innocent bodies for that matter.)

I recently had "the" sex talk with my nine-year-old, so it seemed like the perfect moment to teach her about the tragedy of abortion (discreetly) since the science of a fetus in the womb was fresh in her mind.

“Let me teach you something really sad,” I said. “You know how we talked about how an egg gets fertilized by a sperm and as soon as that happens it becomes a baby, even though it’s the size of a dot?”

She nodded.

“The baby needs time to grow and get big in the mommy’s uterus, right?” I continued.

“But sometimes a mommy decides she doesn’t want the baby. And this is the really sad part. She can ask her doctor to scrape the baby out of her uterus when it’s really little. And it kills the baby. That’s called abortion. Isn’t that horrible? Do you think God likes that?”

“No,” she replied.

“Abortion is murdering your baby. And what does God say?” I pressed on.

“Thou shall not murder,” she responded.

As a mother, you never know exactly how to handle these conversations. You try to be calm and truthful while trusting the Holy Spirit to give you the right words. I felt like it was going pretty well at this point.

Then, all of a sudden, my four-year-old tapped hard on my leg. I didn’t realize she had been standing right behind me. I thought she was playing somewhere else in the front yard.

“But mommy,” she said with a tremble in her voice, “I don’t want to get scraped!”

Now tears were welling up in her eyes. “I don’t want the doctor to scrape me. I want to be four and five and eight.”

“Oh, baby!” I scooped her up into my arms, feeling guilty that she had heard my conversation… and feeling angry that it’s a conversation that must be had at all.

“No one is going to scrape you!” I assured her. “Mommy loves you, and I’m going to keep you safe. You are already four and you are going to be five and eight.”

She was assuaged for the moment, but she brought it back up at bedtime. I do a “high” and “low” of the day with my girls before bed each night, and when I asked my youngest her low, she whimpered, “I don’t want the doctor to scrape me.”

Even a good night’s sleep didn’t put her mind at ease. When I went in to wake her for school the next day, these were the first words out of her mouth: “Some doctors are bad and they scrape people. But I went to the dentist and he was nice and didn’t scrape me,” she explained, still trying to console herself about the brutality of abortion.

As I’ve tried to navigate these horrendous cultural conversations with my kids, I’ve had this thought in the past…

Has a staunch pro-choicer ever had to explain abortion to a young child? Even with the euphemisms of “scraping” or saying that the baby is “tiny," it’s the most atrocious conversation in the world. There are no euphemisms to explain away the murder of a baby. There is no way to soften the conversation when you are telling a preschooler that you would have been in support of snuffing out her life.

Of course, I didn’t mean to tell my four-year-old about abortion. I hope her young mind forgets about it soon and we can revisit the terrible conversation when she is older and more mature.

But her fear reminded me, once again, of how cold, brutal, and hateful abortion really is.

My oldest daughter took the “Latinos for Blue” flyer from me and promptly drew horns and a mustache on Kamala Harris in black Sharpie.

Just a few days later, my youngest brought up the topic once again, “Is the lady with the mustache going to scrape me, mommy?”

Don’t worry, my child. I am not going to let her hurt you, and I am going to vote with all my power and conviction, so she won’t scrape anybody else.